The subject matter discussed in this section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in this section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in this section or associated with the subject matter provided as background should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in this section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to implementations of the claimed technology.
Network service providers need to care about the experience of their subscribers, even if the aggregate performance of individual devices or whole networks is at a very high level. In the world of service providers, subscribers often do not care how much bandwidth the big routers at the core of the Internet can deliver. They care about getting the bandwidth and the experiences for which they are paying. Some of those subscribers may be paying extra for a high quality of service, ensuring a certain level of bandwidth, lower latency, etc. This will be reflected in the differentiated services code points (DSCP), virtual local area network (VLAN) IDs, and/or VLAN priority bits used to identify packets, or qualities of service, which might be treated differently from other packets—similar in concept to business class airline passengers who pay more, and therefore expect more from their experience. Some of those subscribers are paying for more bandwidth so they can share their personal experiences in real-time—at a large outdoor concert in one example, via live streaming, utilizing video and audio traffic.
Measuring subscriber experience scores allows network service providers to improve their ability to predict which subscribers are likely to churn so they can take retention actions. The churn rate, also known as the rate of attrition, is the percentage of subscribers to a service who discontinue their subscriptions to that service within a given time period. For a company to expand its clientele, its growth rate, as measured by the number of new customers, must exceed its churn rate.
Existing systems for analyzing customer experience utilize aggregate quality of experience (QoE) scores and utilize fixed thresholds, considering the subscriber experience at a single time interval, for deciding when the communication services are adequate.
Network systems are very prone to time-variant performance. Because the user base may utilize the system more at certain times and not at others, the load on the system and the resulting quality of service for the end users fluctuates with time. This creates problems with traditional thresholding and alert calculations. One approach for analyzing customer experience is holding a constant threshold level for all timer periods. This approach fails to perform as an adequate alert measure because it is unable to find a balance between false positive and false negative results. Either, the constant threshold level is set too sensitively and alerts with normal cyclic changes or the sensitivity is set too low and the system rarely alerts. The other alternative is dynamic thresholding, in which the thresholds can be varied for given time periods. This approach comes with a requirement for significant manual input of the individual thresholds.
An opportunity arises for alerting a network operator to deteriorated wireless network conditions with granularity and reduced false alerts, applying intelligent thresholding to identify network and device measurements that deviate significantly from behavior on an average day. Intelligent thresholding is usable to objectively evaluate voice, data and short message service (SMS) communication services over multiple time intervals to analyze subscriber experience for an individual, utilizing quality of service indicators to show the network performance history for the individual subscriber. Objective evaluation leads to potentially enhancing subscriber retention rates and increased service quality can affect the amount that subscribers use pay-as-you-go services such as prepaid cell services, thereby directly impacting revenue.